David Oppenheimer was enjoying a pleasant moment outside his home when he got an unexpected visitor that gave him a real fright.
David was lounging on a chair and scrolling through his phone on a nice sunny day in his Asheville, North Carolina, yard when he received an alert from his home camera system that there may be a bear nearby. Unbeknownst to him, the bear was just a few feet away!
“It was almost in front of me,” David told USA Today. “We immediately made eye contact.”
“I was a little frightened because it was right there, and I didn’t know what it would do,” he added.
For a few seconds the two stared at each other. David grabs a pillow and the bear’s ears perked up. But the bear appeared as frightened of David as he was of it and quickly exited the yard. David said the bear had been in his backyard earlier that day to drink out of his bird feeder.
“If I saw it coming, I would be more calm,” David said of the bear. He noted that bears aren’t an uncommon sight in the neighborhood so it didn’t surprise him there was a bear hanging around.
“We are all used to them,” he said. “They really don’t want to bother people.”
A relaxing moment outside after a work day brought a North Carolina man face-to-face with a black bear.
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